Her Fetters Burst
by Allekha
Summary: Abigail doesn't know what to do. She decides to find the person who does. (Post-Mizumono Abigail lives!AU)


A/N: Written for reeby10 for Trick or Treat 2015. Might write an extended version some day.

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Abigail has two scars on her throat now, overlapping. She's still surprised that she woke up at all, let alone woke up able to breathe properly and able to speak (albeit in a rasp, at first, until her throat healed). Hannibal knows what he's doing, knows his anatomy to pinpoint perfection, but she really, truly, though he was going to kill her.

But he didn't. And she's still not entirely sure what his motivations were that night. Was her life a kind of last gift for Will? Was it to see what would happen, what she would do? Or (and this is what she likes to think when her room is dark and quiet) did he care about her enough that he didn't want to kill her?

There are a lot of things she knows about Hannibal, after having lived with him, but she's still working on understanding him.

The doctors think that she's confused, brainwashed. They're only partly wrong, she thinks. She _is_ confused. Her life suddenly has even less direction that it did after – after her parents died. At least then she had a plan: recover enough to go to college, put it all behind her. And then she was living with Hannibal, and that was a kind of stability of its own. But now? Now nobody knows what to do with her – not the doctors, not her social worker, least of all herself.

Dr. Bloom comes to visit her often. Her eyes scream guilt. Abigail thinks that _she's_ the one who should feel guilty, right? It's because of her that Dr. Bloom is in a wheelchair and the doctors don't know if she'll walk without a cane again. Then again, it's also Hannibal's fault. And it's also Dr. Bloom's fault for not noticing what Hannibal was even after she got so involved with him. Abigail doesn't know what to think, and it makes her talks with Dr. Bloom seem to stretch on forever in uncomfortable conversation.

(Her therapist says she should keep a journal to work her feelings out. Abigail doesn't trust anyone not to read it. Who wouldn't? Nobody will let her see the news but she must be even more of a sensation than before.)

Ms. Lounds visits her, too, sometimes. Abigail read a lot of _Tattlecrime_ while living with Hannibal. She plays up her rasp, does a lot of nodding as Ms. Lounds lays out the framework for a newer, different version of the book. This one, she is sure, will paint her as the poor, confused teenager manipulated by a serial killer into becoming his twisted child and accomplice. It's an even more palatable, sympathy-inviting narrative than the one she had before.

She only sees Will once. He's in the hospital longer than she is with his injuries, and the staff at the treatment center she's moved to make it obvious at the first visit that they don't want him there. At least they don't actually keep him out. Their conversation is awkward. What kind of things do people talk about after they've been cut open by someone they still don't hate? She ends up asking him about his dogs, and that passes some of the time, and mostly she's just glad to see him again, see that he's okay.

Abigail doesn't ask him if he's going to go find Hannibal again, because she already knows the answer. It's there in the way Will talks about him for the few halting minutes they bring him up. It's in his eyes; it's in his voice. She thinks that he wants to join Hannibal, but maybe he wants to kill him. (Maybe it's both; if there's one thing she's learned, it's that love and murder are not mutually exclusive concepts.)

She skips her group therapy sessions but she goes to the art sessions every time. Sometimes she tries to draw the streets of Paris and Florence, the way Hannibal described them to her; sometimes she draws deer, pretty deer with soft fur and big eyes; occasionally she draws the murders. The therapist thinks that the latter drawings are helping her work through her feelings. Maybe they are. Abigail looks at them and thinks that she would have done them differently, but there's something to admire in Hannibal's style. It's much better than just burying those people in the ground, better than letting them rot in a river.

It is looking at one of those pictures, describing it with a voice that no longer rasps, that she makes up her mind.

This place is harder to sneak out of than the old one, but she still manages. She walks away from it at a brisk pace, mind whirling. Plans that have been lurking in her head start to coalesce.

It's harder to steal a wallet than it is to murder someone. That feels backwards, but it was so easy to stick a knife in a man's belly and slide, in her self defense. Easy enough to push Dr. Bloom out the window, even though Abigail _liked_ her. There were more important things, and Hannibal told her to do it.

She has options now. Technically, she could just run away. Go to Canada or Mexico or some rural state, where the police won't find her. Find a job, earn some money, live in her own lonely room, and try to forget everything. Her mom, her dad, Will, Hannibal, Ms. Lounds – everything.

But she doesn't know if the police would find her anyway. And she doesn't think she can forget, anymore. There's too much of it. She just wants someone to help her figure out what to do. Her social worker isn't helping and Ms. Lounds's only real suggestion is to write a book.

There's Will, maybe. He wouldn't turn her in. They could go find Hannibal together. Maybe they could build the picture that Hannibal painted for her: just her and him and Will, living somewhere with beautiful architecture and lots of home-cooked meals laden with fresh meat.

Something about the idea of going to him puts her off. Maybe it's that she hasn't actually talked with Will in forever; doubts niggle at her as to what he really wants to do with Hannibal. _They_ might enjoy the idea of killing the other, but she doesn't. Maybe it's just the feeling that she'd be running off after a father figure again, begging for help. She's not that weak, is she? Hannibal taught her a few things. Surely she can find him on her own.

In the end, she uses the credit card in the wallet to take cash out at an ATM. She buys herself a new set of clothes, hair dye that she uses the next morning in a locked public bathroom, and a real meal for breakfast, among other necessities.

Abigail doesn't know where to buy a fake ID or how to get out of the country without any ID at all. So she does the next best thing: she walks around neighborhoods (nice ones, but not so nice that every home has a security system) until she finds a family with a girl that looks like her.

She imagines Hannibal talking to her when she breaks in, later, when everyone is off at work and school. In her mind, he tells her not to get caught leaving fingerprints, to be careful about disturbing anything. The first house she tries, she doesn't find a passport for the girl her age, but she gets luckier on her second try.

To get plane tickets, she uses a different house in a different neighborhood. When she's done booking the earliest plane to Paris that she can find, she tucks the card back into its wallet and prays that no-one notices until she's gone. (She uses the private mode on the browser, of course, and Googles how to cover her tracks a little more thoroughly. She is tempted to also look at _Tattlecrime_ , while she's at it, but she's already shaking from nerves at the thought of getting caught.)

She picked up more than a few facts about psychology from Hannibal, and she read his books a lot when she was bored and he was at work. At the airport she does her best to put it all to use and not look too nervous as she goes through security. She goes for bored, tired – it's an early-morning flight. And it works – no-one looks at her twice.

Abigail celebrates by buying herself dinner and picking up a newspaper, curious to see if there's still anything about her in there. There is, but not much, just a small column squished in to a middle page. She passes the rest of the time before her flight by staring out the dark windows, sipping on a cup of tea, and thinking.

She doesn't know how to find Hannibal in Paris. But that's okay. _She_ doesn't need to find _him_ ; all she has to do is send him a message that only he'll understand, and she already knows how she's going to do it.


End file.
